Any other business

I've been a bit lazy with art of late, so to start making up for lost time, today I went to two exhibitions focusing mainly on artists born in the 90s. Both were in places I'd never visited before. I started at the Studio des Acacias, which is showing Des Corps Libres - une jeune scène française, a Reiffers Art initiative curated by Thibaut Wychowanok. I found Salomé Chatriot's HD videos and big, glossy print on Perspex quite interesting. There was also a very seductive little painting, in fact tiny, of a young man carrying a big black dog. And there was a spectacular piece called Holy Hole by Pol Taburet, 2022 winner of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize . I often tell people one of the problems with buying art by good young artists is that they soon get even better but by then are beyond my price range. Knowing that, I should have bought something when Ali Hasanzadeh put together Pol Taburet's first exhibition at Balice Hertling's Belleville space, instead of he...

Waiting Line, 2020 (detail; the full painting is 16 x 23 cm) Jean Claracq is a young artist whose work I first came across at the Sultana gallery in Paris and at a couple of institutional group exhibitions. Then, when I went to an open day at Le Houloc, a studio in the Paris suburbs shared by nearly 20 young artists (invited by the amazingly dynamic Célia Coëtte ), I had the good fortune to meet him and was able to visit his studio space there. He often works on a small scale, and thus sometimes combines contemporary content with references (direct quotations or not) to medieval manuscripts, portrait miniatures such as Hilliard's, the details (landscapes, perspectives, distant cities, forests, skies...) of renaissance art, and oriental painting of, e.g., Iran's negargari tradition. When I visited Le Houloc, as I take an amateurish interest in Iranian art, I was interested to see he was working on a small painting, at that time just sketched out, to be called Waiting Line  (a...